If Covid Passports are run by Gove’s placemen and sinecurists they will be authoritarian & worthless
Last summer when pubs were open in many areas a requirement of admission was that you scan a QR code using the NHS App on your mobile so that if COVID infection was reported this could be tracked and traced.
I had no issue with doing that and I did. Later it became clear that the privateers running the system at vast expense to the public and vast profit to themselves hadn’t bothered to check the data.
It was the world of Sinecurists and placemen that William Cobbett wrote of before the 1832 Reform Act. People who held profitable Government jobs not because they were any good at them or often did them at all but because of who they were and who they knew.
Cobbett wrote in Rural Rides:
There was no harm in them that I know of beyond that of living upon the public, but, where were their merits? They had none, to distinguish them, and to entitle them to the great sums they received
Reading a story that Gove has leaked to the Telegraph (2.4) about the trialling of COVID Passports at events in May I have the same issue.
I have no problem in being vaccinated. I’ve had my first jab and will get my second as soon as it is offered.
If a system of showing that I have had the vaccine is run by the NHS I wouldn’t have an issue showing where appropriate that this was the case. That would be a voluntary matter not an authoritarian compulsory intrusion into public life.
If on the other hand, as last summer, the system is run by one of Gove’s mates, at vast public expense and vast profit to themselves, and who wouldn’t bother to check the data anyway, I’m with Cobbett. This is not required.
Without any guarantee the data gathered will used and used properly, Gove’s latest plan has something of the echo of a well known Michael Rosen poem. Gove is not a fascist but he has no issue with ramping up authoritarianism and lots of issues with democracy:
http://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/fascism-i-sometimes-fear.html
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